Maybe I’m just old fashioned, or maybe I’m a bit stiff-necked, but I will never relent in my opposition to tax increases so long as the crowd in Washington is spending money on things that are not appropriate functions of the federal government.

The Social Security Administration made $6.5 billion in overpayments to people not entitled to receive them in 2009, including $4 billion under a supplemental income program for the very poor, a government investigator said Tuesday. In all, about 10 percent of the payments made under the agency’s Supplemental Security Income program were improper, said Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr., the Social Security inspector general. …Throughout the federal government, improper payments totaled $125 billion last year, up from $110 billion in 2009, O’Carroll said. In 2009, only two other agencies — the Departments of Health and Human Services, and Labor — had more improper payments than Social Security, he said.

In a recent presentation, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago included a couple of graphs that illustrate this phenomenon. This first chart shows the history of U.S. economic growth over the past 140 years. As you can see, the growth rate was remarkably constant over time, and there were always periods of rapid growth following economic downturns.

Lucas, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1995, then looks at the data for the recent downturn and recovery. As you can see, we have been struggling to get back to average growth rates and we have not enjoyed any of the above-average growth that normally follows a recession.

The key question, of course, is why growth has been anemic, resulting in (what seems to be) a permanent loss of output. In his presentation, Lucas warns that bad government policy is playing a big role. He says that “the problem is government is doing too much,” and he specifically highlights the “likelihood of much higher taxes, focused on ‘the rich'” and a “large increase in the role of government” in the healthcare sector.

In his conclusion, Professor Lucas is not overly optimistic about recovering lost output. He doesn’t make any flamboyant claims, but he does note that “European economies have larger government role and 20-30% lower income level than US.”

P.S. It should be noted that America’s anemic economic performance in recent years is not solely Obama’s fault. As the White House repeatedly points out, he inherited a downturn. That is completely accurate. My complaint, however, is that Obama promised hope and change but instead has exacerbated the big government policies of his predecessor.